Despite Bad Night, Ducks Need to Continue to Start Lukas Dostal

Last night’s contest between the Edmonton Oilers and Anaheim Ducks in Game 5 of their first-round series started exactly the way you would expect, with the Oilers down 3-1 and facing elimination. News broke before puck drop that Oilers captain Connor McDavid would suit up despite missing practice, and Edmonton came out like a team that knew its season was on the line.

The Oilers were not trying to be fancy. No tic-tac-toe passes, no perimeter play. They pressured puck carriers, forechecked relentlessly, and got pucks on net. Shots were finding crossbars and coming up near Lukas Dostal’s head early. The message was clear from the first shift – the Oilers were not going home without a fight.

What made this game different from the previous four was that the Ducks didn’t find their footing in the second and third periods. In every other game of this series, Anaheim battled back after falling behind. This time, they could not respond, and a significant part of that story runs through Dostal.

Dostal’s Night to Forget

The Czech goaltender made two or three questionable puck-handling decisions in the first half of the opening period, and the Oilers made him pay for it as the game wore on. The first goal came off a Vasili Podkolzin snipe. The second was a Zach Hyman tip. Both were tough to swallow, but the real dagger was self-inflicted.

Dostal went behind his own net to retrieve a loose puck, waited, and sent it up the boards. It was not a particularly difficult play, but the puck was recovered along the boards and eventually tipped in by Leon Draisaitl off a point shot from Evan Bouchard. It was a mistake that directly led to a goal, and one that deflated the building. Dostal was pulled shortly after, with backup Ville Husso coming in to finish the game.

Through five playoff games, Dostal has a .864 save percentage and has allowed 18 goals. Those numbers do not inspire confidence and will fuel the debate heading into Game 6.

Goaltenders Pay in the Playoffs

He is a talented young goaltender who is still learning what it takes to perform at the highest level when the margin for error disappears. Playoff hockey exposes every goaltender’s weaknesses, and Dostal is no different. He will make costly mistakes, but it will come down to how many, what kind, and whether the team around him can absorb them.

In games where the Ducks hold a series lead and have a chance to eliminate one of the league’s best offensive teams, the organization needs its goaltender to be a closer. On this night, Dostal was not.

Quenneville’s Goaltending Decision

The Ducks will host Game 6 at the Honda Center, where head coach Joel Quenneville faces one of the more consequential decisions of his tenure with the team. Does he trust that Game 5 was an outlier – one rough outing from a young goalie against a desperate, elite team – and hand Dostal the crease to close out the series, or does he turn to Husso and play the hot hand?

Husso has playoff experience. In 2022 with the St. Louis Blues, he appeared in seven games and posted an .890 save percentage before the Blues were eliminated by the Colorado Avalanche in the second round. He is a capable backup who can keep a team in a game, but his playoff resume reads more as serviceable than reliable.

Turning away from Dostal now would be a short-term reaction to one bad night, and replacing him with a goalie whose own playoff history offers no guarantees is not the answer. Quenneville has better reasons to stick with his starter than to walk away from him.

History and conventional wisdom point in one direction: Lean on your starter. Trust that he has the character to respond, that one bad night does not erase what got the team there, and that not starting him now sends the wrong message to the locker room.